


i see your games and i'll you raise you mine

by AmateurSleeper



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M, Finnick Odair - Freeform, Fucked Up Love, Panem, johanna mason - Freeform, the before and the after, the hunger games - Freeform, thg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-11
Updated: 2014-01-11
Packaged: 2018-01-08 10:06:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1131352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmateurSleeper/pseuds/AmateurSleeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. Johanna and Finnick's story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i see your games and i'll you raise you mine

_Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again._

 

 

 

There is before and there is after. There is before the games, and after the games. There is before the war and after the war. And in between and before and after are the stories, the great stories. Love conquering all, good vaniquishing evil, the underdog rising and rising and overcoming all obstacles, doing what is good because it must be done. (The stories never end in suffering, why would they be? No one wants to read about that. That's why the people of Panem cut the Katniss' story short. You want a hero you can root for, not one you know is doomed). 

Theirs is not one of them. No one knew to care about them, the ones jammed in between. No one knew theirs was even a story.

That’s how you know it was doomed.

 

 

 

 

He does not remember her in the games. That was the whole point though, wasn’t it? It strikes Finnick as such a beautiful ploy years later as he looks at her. The girl who demands to be heard and seen and felt won her games by becoming invisible, helpless when she is anything but. No one ever gives Johanna enough credit when it comes to her games. She's a visceral demanding creature, even if it is not intentional. The fact that she could fool anyone by pretending to be naive and weak astounds him, the only one left.

Finnick may not remember her games, but Johanna remembers his games. It's all she can ever remember sometimes, he's just that good. His beauty, his bravado, his charm, his character. He was a Career, he was trained, he was everything she hated. It was love at first sight, for the Capitol that is. Of course the Capitol loved him. They loved to hate and love her (she has to remind herself that he is always so much more than that).

If only they could keep the games going forever ... 

It would have never worked anyway.

 

 

 

 

Of course, they meet. It wouldn’t be a story no one knows if they didn’t meet.

Publicly, it was after her victory tour. At a party of course, at a stupid Capitol party, of course, at a time in their lives when there was nothing to look forward to and only to look back. She thought he was a pretty boy, dolled up and loyal to the Capitol like other Careers. The Capitol’s little plaything. He thought she was an abrasive hot head who wasted away her skills of deception. The Capitol’s latest victim. The press liked their playful sparring, a verbal match between the hottest of the Victors. What good friends these two will make. (They have no idea how good. No one does).

But how they meet isn’t it important because it wasn’t real, not at all. Nothing ever is in the Capitol. 

At a Victor’s dinner, one hosted every year by the previous Victor. But no one not important knows these secrets, only those who play the games. The sponsors, the Capitol elite, the Victors, the associates of murder.

Anyway, Annie Cresta is not well, not at all. The dinner goes on anyway. Finnick’s trying to save face and be charming and keep Annie calm around a bunch of people she does not know. He doesn’t know why he can’t stop trying to save this girl, the mad girl who causes him to lose so much sleep at night worrying about. A Capitol member touches Annie, as innocently as a Capitol businessman is capable of, and the dinner self-destructs. She screams, she shrieks—the banshee in the wind, warning everyone of a danger everyone already knows exists. Mags escorts Annie away quietly, and for once, Finnick, who must stay, is not his regular charming self, not the ones the Capitol wants to love and fuck and adore.

“It must be what I hear is called cabin fever. Too much time near the sea,” Johanna proclaims to the Capitol members, an eye on Finnick. “I can’t imagine living here year round. I mean, I like a midnight swim as much as the next girl, but could you imagine being at sea for so long? She needs some fresh air, woods preferably. I know I do after being here only a day.” Nervous laughter turns to real laughter, charmed by her lack of charm, curious at her aggression in how she speaks. She continues to talk, half rants about the weather in Four, their minds drawn to the girl who is so blunt.

Johanna watches the beautiful boy in front of her nearly lose it over the girl losing it. She wonders why he puts up with all of this, pretending to be the golden boy when he’s a stone cold killer, she knows, she studied his games, even if he was a Career. How can he not hate them as she does? She saw it in her games. But then again:

He’s the boy everyone loves.

 

 

 

 

The first time they ask Johanna to fuck a Capitol Elite, Finnick is the first to know, before the deal even happens. He deals in secrets, after all. And he hears how she refuses, absolutely. They warn her as subtly as the Capitol can: they chop off her father’s hands with his own axe.

He visits her that night, in secret. Of course, in secret. They may not be friends, but they are Victors. It counts for something. “You should make them love you. That’s how you survive.”

She nearly snorts. “That doesn’t work for girls like me. I’m not the girl you fall in love with.”

He studies her with curious regard. “So what are you going to do exactly? Make them hate you? Erase their desire for you?”

“I’ll keep playing their games my own way.” Johanna wears defiance like Finnick wears the sea now, weathered yet natural. He watches the proud tilt of her chin, her unbroken spirit. He decides that though she is not yet mad or maybe she already is entirely. (It must be his type, he'll later think).

Oh, how the Victors vary. She is a foreign creature from a foreign land (he envies her, he respects her, he thinks about her more and more). And so it goes. She refuses once more, directly to President Snow. They massacre her entire family, extended by three generations. Slowly, but surely. One by one, after each refusal. He heard they made her watch, but that wasn't so much secret as gossip. He heard they made her pick who would die first. He heard they made her do it.

He can't ask her if that's true.

Finnick attends the last funeral months later, watches a very wooden Johanna walk to each casket, because she waited to bury all of them. (They are beautifully crafted, detailed. He wonders if she made some of them ahead of time.) And at each grave, she knocks off the white roses, takes the last one and sets it on fire. And after all this time, she’s still playing her games as he is still playing his.

 

 

 

They fuck hard in the woods, far away from all the madness and death, before it can search for them again. Of course, it catches up with them eventually. But that's later.

Let's give them this, just for a little while. Because it will end, as all things do. After the games and before the war. Amicable, but not really. He is still loved and she is still hated, and for a while by each other. But after? After, there is no after the war for both of them (in one way or another). There just is.

 

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